Herrmann Wuthering Heights – Suite; Echoes for Strings* (both arr. Hans Sørensen) Keri Fuge (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone); Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Mario Venzago, *Joshua Tan Chandos CHSA 5337 (CD/SACD) 80:41 mins
See the name Bernard Herrmann and most will recall the film scores the American composer (1911-75) wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, that thrillingly inventive music with more than an edge of brooding darkness and chaotic intensity. He was famously hard-nosed, but behind that cantankerous façade was a man with a great passion for romance and a deep love of all things English, especially our great works of literature. Turning Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights into an opera was perhaps a logical step for him in 1943 (he’d just scored Fox’s Jane Eyre), though it was certainly a surprising one given the success he was enjoying on the radio and on the screen. Despite that success, Herrmann longed to be taken seriously as a composer (and conductor) and he launched himself into his opera, certain it would be a career-defining work. The result, a three-and-a-half-hour epic, was finally finished in 1951. Its gestation saw Herrmann obsess over Brontë’s world in between radio, film and conducting assignments. It took it’s toll, the period seeing the end of his first marriage and something close to a nervous breakdown. That the opera then went unstaged in his lifetime only added to Herrmann’s woes, though he mounted (and largely paid for) what is still the only recording of the complete work in 1966.
That brings us to this 2011 ‘Suite’ from the opera, arranged by Hans Sørensen to mark Herrmann’s centenary and recorded last year in Singapore. Sørensen sticks faithfully to Herrmann’s massive orchestration, but distills the narrative so as to focus wholly on Cathy and Heathcliff. Through their two voices – a radiant Keri Fuge and a towering Roderick Williams, we’re drawn immediately into their intense love affair (with each other and the wild landscape that seemingly defines them). The orchestra is as much a character, taking on the roles of the rugged moors and the violent weather, and while Herrmann’s uncompromising score could easily suffocate, it more than finds its match in Williams’s virile baritone. The composer seemingly feels every moment of romance, though, drenching the few moments of sunlight, beauty and rapture with probably his most gorgeous refrains – the soaring love theme would make a more familiar appearance in Herrmann’s 1947 film score for The Ghost and Mrs Muir.
Even at its full length, the libretto (adapted from Brontë by Herrmann’s then wife, Lucille Fletcher) took in only half of the story, ending in Cathy’s death. Naturally, Sørensen’s edit cuts to the chase even more so, Heathcliff’s rage at her demise all the more intense.
In realising Wuthering Heights in music, Herrmann succeeded where Delius did not – he abandoned his own adaptation. This snapshot, stunningly recorded, serves as a tantalising sample of what it might be to go on Herrmann’s entire emotionally wrought journey. Perhaps we might one day see a new full recording?
Recorded two years earlier under Joshua Tan, Sørensen’s 2011 string-orchestra arrangement of Herrmann’s 1965 Echoes quartet is a welcome addition and a scintillating coda. The added orchestral weight serves the work well, with some ‘echoes’ indeed of the composer’s memorable score for Psycho.
Michael Beek
